Jennifer Lawrence, in full Jennifer Shrader Lawrence (born August 15, 1990, Indian Hills, northeast of Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.) American actress who by the age of 22 had been nominated twice for the Academy Award for best actress. In 2013, on her second nomination, she won the award for Silver Linings Playbook (2012). Lawrence was known for her versatility on-screen and her accessible, honest off-screen persona.

Jennifer Lawrence after winning the Academy Award for best actress, 2013.

Lawrence knew from an early age that she wanted to act, and she began performing in school plays and local theatre in Louisville, Kentucky. At the age of 14, in 2005, hoping to break into acting and modeling, she went with her mother to New York City to visit talent agencies. While there, she was discovered by a talent scout and subsequently auditioned for his agency. She spent the summer of that year in New York, performing small acting roles and modeling for advertisements. On the basis of that success, after Lawrence’s early graduation from high school, the family moved to Los Angeles to allow her to further her career.

From 2007 to 2009 Lawrence played the teenaged daughter of a psychotherapist in the cable-television comedy The Bill Engvall Show. She soon followed that with the role that proved to be her big break, the lead in the movieWinter’s Bone (2010). For her portrayal of Ree, a poor rural teenager tracking down her missing criminal father in the Ozark Mountains, Lawrence, at the age of 20, received her first best actress Academy Award nomination.

Lawrence rose to greater fame in the role of the shape-shifting mutant Mystique in X-Men: First Class (2011), a role she reprised in X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) and X-Men: Apocalypse (2016). She made the transition to stardom upon being cast as heroine Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games (2012)—the film version of the first book in the Hunger Games trilogy, Suzanne Collins’s runaway best-selling young-adult novels. As Katniss, Lawrence played a character with some similarities to Ree, another tough teenager using outdoor survival skills to stay alive in dire circumstances. Lawrence also starred in another notable film in 2012, director David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook. In that movie she played Tiffany Maxwell, a young widow who befriends a man struggling with mental illness (played by Bradley Cooper). She won critical acclaim in the popular film and became the second youngest woman to win the Academy Award for best actress (2013). Lawrence then appeared as the wife of a con artist (Christian Bale) in Russell’s cat-and-mouse romp American Hustle (2013); the role earned her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress.

She reprised the role of Katniss in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013), The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 (2014), and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 (2015). Lawrence again paired with Cooper in Serena (2014), a poorly received drama set in a lumber camp in 1929. In 2015 she portrayed a benighted single mother whose entrepreneurial talents propel her to wealth and success in Russell’s Joy; for her performance, Lawrence received her fourth Oscar nomination. She narrated A Beautiful Planet (2016), a documentary featuring footage of Earth taken from the International Space Station.

Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part …

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From left to right, Sam Claflin, Josh Hutcherson, and Jennifer Lawrence in The …

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Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part …

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any of a number of awards presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, located in Beverly Hills, California, U.S., to recognize achievement in the film industry. The award, a gold-plated statuette, is bestowed upon winners in the following 24 categories: best picture,...

largest city in Kentucky, U.S., and the seat of Jefferson county, opposite the Falls of the Ohio River. Louisville is the centre of a metropolitan area including Jefferson county in Kentucky and Clark and Floyd counties in Indiana. Bridges spanning the Ohio link the city with New Albany and...

constituent state of the United States of America. Rivers define Kentucky’s boundaries except on the south, where it shares a border with Tennessee along a nearly straight line of about 425 miles (685 km), and on the southeast, where it shares an irregular, mountainous border with Virginia....

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(born 1990). American actress Jennifer Lawrence was known for her versatility on-screen and for her accessible off-screen personality. By the age of 22, she had been nominated twice for the Academy Award for best actress. In 2013, on her second nomination, she won the award for her role in Silver Linings Playbook (2012).